Review of:

Stephen Muecke's No Road (Bitumen all the way) (1997) is an amusing,
engaging and challenging text which reflects the cross-fertilisation of
'theory' and 'fiction.' This uniquely structured novel is appropriately
read in the broader context of discussion regarding the valuation,
incorporation and/or appropriation of Aboriginality in the Australian
context.

Home, especially as it relates to nationhood, is one of many topics
addressed in the text, which to some extent reflects the resurgence of
interest in home as a potentially enabling concept--albeit one with a
troubled and often politically conservative history. Theoretical
engagements with 'home' in the Australian context arise both because of
Australia's history as an 'immigrant nation' and also, perhaps to a
lesser extent, because indigenous claims rest for their discursive power
on the claim to be 'at home.' Described as having "nowhere to go,
according to white expectations, but more 'at home' in this context (in
this case the fringes of Australian towns) than any Australian can ever
quite be" (Muecke 14), indigenous people, especially rural-dwelling
individuals and groups, have come to embody the 'homeliness' that
non-Aboriginal (and perhaps particularly Anglo) Australians appear to
desire. Muecke's journeys from Paris and the inner-city suburbs of
Sydney to remote Australian landscapes enable and enrich his reflections
on home, emplacement and mobility. However, his quest for Aboriginal
stories frequently leads him away from Sydney (which has a comparatively
large Aboriginal population) and, as a result, his musings on
Aboriginality and belonging rarely challenge the notion that Aboriginal
people are primarily and even 'properly' located in 'outback' rather than
city spaces.

Though he registers the significance of discourses of dispossession to
modern subjects, Muecke does not draw connections between the claim to
marginality and 'post-colonial racism'--a term the cultural geographer
Jane Jacobs has coined to describe the 'new racist' view that "Aborigines
despite their economic and political marginalisation, now have too much,
too much special legislation, too much land" (Jacobs and Anderson 19). Had he done so, Muecke may have been less inclined to imply an
equivalence between 'displaced' and 'modern' subjects (152). Some of his
claims, for instance: "as a family we felt marginalised; everyone else
seemed to be gay or lesbian . . . [w]e appropriated the jargon of
'hyphenated or hybrid identities' and claimed our children represented
this indeterminacy of gender" (153), though they contain an element of
parody, could be considered problematic by critics who have (rightly)
pointed out that if fragmentation, marginalisation and dispersion are
seen to constitute "the representative modern experience"(Hall 113),
claims to displacement generally are divested of their oppositional
power. Nevertheless, this occasional tendency toward glibness does not
detract from Muecke's subtly-made point that blurring the boundaries
between centre and margin may expand, rather than preclude, the
possibilities for reforming politics.

Meaghan Morris' illuminating essays on the conventional opposition
home/travel provide an obvious springboard for
Muecke's own thinking about travelling and home in the contemporary
Australian context. Having cited Morris, Muecke replicates something of
her invigorating and often "undisciplined" (43) style. In the process, he
contributes to the development of a new space for himself and others who
may wish to explore complex theoretical questions in innovative ways.
The wide-ranging nature of the text enables Muecke to make salient
contributions to an immense variety of debates and topics, including
tourism, travel, hybridity, essentialism, identity, Aboriginal drinking
and post-modern architecture, to name but a few provocatively tackled in
the text. While the implied reader of No Road is a theoretically
informed one, likely to be attuned to the complexities of these
discussions, most readers with an interest in any of the above issues,
for example, will find themselves newly challenged and refreshingly
engaged.

Combining wit with a theoretically informed perspective, Muecke also
explores the tensions that inhere in the relation between theory and
practice:

I'm vulnerable, I'm thinking half the time that being a plumber would be
a whole lot more useful than doing Aboriginal studies. I mean, you can
imagine turning up in some community in the North-West to fix the
plumbing. That the people would see the point in doing. But the other?
- "Hi, I'm a cultural critic, I've come to fix up your
representations". (91).

In addition to examining the complex issues of representation, No Road is
committed to theorising language, writing and words in relation to
journeying, emplacement, belonging and power: "Bonnie belongs to this
territory where she can tell her stories by the river in the morning or
at night under millions of stars. 'You don't care, I can tell you
anything, eh?' she says to me, not suspecting that I adore her" (144).
Muecke's tone oscillates between this engaged,even occasionally
enraptured perspective, and ironic distance as he creatively explores the
relations between one's locatedness and the production of narratives, between
emplacement and storytelling.

Capitalism's relation to Aboriginality is interrogated throughout the
book and Muecke--despite his own differently constructed desire for
relations with Aboriginal people--demonstrates his acute awareness of
the ways in which Aboriginality, frequently constructed as 'Other,' has
been re-made in recent years. Exploring the somewhat disturbing overlaps
that exist between tourist and research practices, Muecke discusses the
difference between "mixing with them" and "parallelism" (34). Drawing on
a wide variety of sources and traversing various places, he quotes an
'ancient’'Yoruba proverb,

No matter how long the log lies in the water
it will never become a crocodile (53)

thereby reminding readers that the desire to transcend oneself, which frequently
underlies the search for cross-cultural encounters, can never be fully
realised. Cognisant of the ways in which the discourse of 'discovery' is
bound up with various progress narratives and with tourism--pioneering's
contemporary counterpart--Muecke seeks to bring other travel stories to
the fore, stories which convey roads on which ritual and repetition,
rather than the quest for novelty might prevail. He describes, for
instance, an Aboriginal story in which "the two men, because they are
Creation Beings, create, name, bring places into being, so that from that
point on people will always travel this road and always find these
things. This road is not a pioneering road, it is not part of progress,
novelty or modernity" (60). Thus, Muecke reminds readers that travel is
about the recovery of ancient space, layered with conflicting stories,
tales of colonial bloodshed, white mythologies and "the promise of Asian
investment and ‘future development" (58).

Muecke's exploration of the relations between people refigures sameness
and otherness. While the paths of individuals are always 'parallel
lines,' there are moments in which meeting places arise and unity,
however temporary, can be experienced. Drawing on sources as diverse as
his friend Abdelkarim, St Augustine and Newtonian physics, Muecke's
imaginative and often poignant exploration of difference,
incommensurability, knowledge and convergence is as much about the
relations between strangers from similar "textual suburbs" (20) as it is
about exploring broader questions such as the relation between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal philosophies. Claiming that "there is too much
invested in liberal white demands for authenticity which preserve
distance in relation to Aboriginal lives, making them apart in time and
space," Muecke suggests that as a result "passionate and public
encounters are increasingly rare" (102). In contrast, his own refusal to
shy away from depicting the more 'negative' aspects of Aboriginal culture
alongside the 'positive' ones makes him something of a pioneer in a field
in which a wide variety of representations of Aboriginal people might
become possible. Exploring the various shapes and forms that 'Otherness'
and relating to it takes, Muecke juxtaposes his letter about the
"re-making of Coonardoo, to Trinh--the most sought after feminist
film-maker in the world" (95) with his friend's fascination with
'getting a bit of the other,' in this case Joy, an Aboriginal woman.
Here, Muecke's ambiguous "J'ai envie" (108) makes it impossible to
construct his own fascination with Otherness as something which exists
outside colonialism. However, this is a rare moment in No Road--the
book's own desire for novel (frequently Aboriginal) stories and
philosophies goes largely unchallenged. Despite Muecke's innovative
weaving of theory--including Lingis and Trinh Minh-ha on otherness, humour and politics--No Road does not traverse the path of
self-reflexivity to the point where Muecke's own quest to open up new
ways of becoming other is itself sufficiently problematised. Informed by
Deleuze and Guattari, the author's desire for a "lightness of touch--we
drift if we can" (191) is bound up with wanting to imagine himself
"already gone" (135), a desire which approximates the quest for
objectivity, the effort to absent oneself, which characterises
imperialist ethnography. For all its cleverness, No Road stops short of
divulging what might be at stake for the author in critiquing the desire
for cross-cultural encounters.

Despite the author's apparent compulsion to occupy the position of
'knower' on occasions--a tendency which Muecke humorously alludes to
several times--for instance, "I got out my papers, the intellectual
showing off even as we were almost lost" (132), and when he tries to
"teach Patience how to walk the Aboriginal way" (195), No Road provides
"something new"(184), in contrast to "the old (which) is always the
confident step, the almost cliched, the acceptable" (159). Against roads
which have "done all the thinking for us"(125), Muecke concatenates ideas
in an effort to disrupt the certainties of Imperial grids and to keep
theory moving. Muecke is the "affective academic subject whose complex
intersubjective relations are part of his writing" (138) and No Road,
partly because of its idiosyncratic style, makes an immensely valuable
contribution to thought about a variety of complex subjects, including
Aboriginality, subjectivity and nationhood.